noun
Street Slang
camelback
· noun · nola
A shotgun house with a single-story front and a two-story rear.
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Definitions
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A New Orleans shotgun house with a hump on the back — one story up front, two stories at the rear. Built that way in the late 1800s because property taxes were assessed on the number of front-facing stories, so locals stacked the extra room out of sight. Tax dodge as architecture.
“They got a camelback on Magazine, two bedrooms upstairs in the hump.”
by community
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camelback In A Sentence
They got a camelback on Magazine, two bedrooms upstairs in the hump.
Origin & Usage
Late 19th-century New Orleans, evolved from the shotgun house. The two-story rear addition (the 'hump') let owners add bedrooms without paying higher front-facing-story property taxes.
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